Gustav Mahler

Composer

• Born: July 7, 1860
• Birthplace: Kalischt, Bohemia, Austrian Empire (now Kalisště, Czech Republic)
• Died: May 18, 1911
• Place of death: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)

Austrian conductor and composer

Mahler had parallel careers as conductor and composer, in each of which he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the leading musical figure of his generation. His ten symphonies and other varied compositions represent the culmination of romanticism and the beginnings of modern music.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Gustav Mahler (GEWS-tahf MAH-luhr) was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, a small town that now lies in the Czech Republic but which was then part of the Austrian Empire. His father, Bernhard Mahler, had married Marie Hermann three years earlier, and a son was born in 1858, but he died in infancy. Bernhard, a coachman who had become the owner of a small distillery and tavern, was thirty at the time of his marriage and ten years older than his bride. Marie may have agreed to marry beneath her social station because she was lame from birth, for there is no evidence of affection between her and the ambitious Bernhard.

In the sixteen years following Gustav’s birth, his mother bore twelve more children, of which six died in infancy. Though this rate of infant mortality was not uncommon at the time, in an emotionally ambivalent household it could not fail to affect a sensitive child like Gustav. It is reported that when he was asked, at an early age, what he would like to be when he grew up, he replied: “A martyr.” Fortunately, his love of music soon became a refuge from the brutality of his home life: At age four he could play folk tunes on a small accordion, and at five he was discovered in his grandparents’ attic playing a piano. By the age of ten, he gave his first public piano recital, which took place in the Moravian town of Iglau (now Jihlava), where the family had moved in late 1860.

In the Austria of Mahler’s youth, there had been a liberalization in the laws governing the activities of members of the Jewish faith, to which all Gustav’s forebears belonged (though perhaps with varying degrees of orthodoxy). Gustav’s father, who read widely and fancied himself a scholar, was devoted to the hope that his children would take advantage of the situation and improve their lot in life. Bernhard hoped that Gustav would excel in music, but he also insisted that Gustav continue his general education; in 1870, Gustav was sent to Prague to study. When it was discovered that Gustav was being mistreated in the home where he boarded and received piano lessons, his father brought him back to Iglau.

Mahler’s growing local reputation as a pianist caused him to be taken by a benefactor to play for Julius Epstein, a professor at the Vienna Conservatory of Music. On September 20, 1875, the fifteen-year-old Mahler was enrolled at the conservatory, where he remained for nearly three years studying harmony, composition, and piano. Perhaps as significant as the instruction that he received was his exposure to the artistic life of Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, and the home of successive generations of great composers. In June, 1876, Gustav’s single-minded devotion to his studies won for him the conservatory’s first prize in piano for a performance of a sonata by Franz Schubert, a Viennese predecessor whose influence can be seen in Mahler’s mature work. Another piano prize followed in 1877, and in the same year he won a prize for the composition of a chamber music work. When Mahler left the conservatory with a diploma in 1878, he possessed a fine general musical education. At his father’s insistence, however, Gustav immediately returned to Iglau to continue his general studies, and in the summer he passed his final examinations, apparently not without difficulty. Although his father has been unsympathetically treated by the composer’s biographers, Mahler’s broad range of intellectual interests may be credited partly to Bernhard’s persistent influence.

Life’s Work

Returning to Vienna in the autumn of 1878, Mahler was enrolled at the university to study philosophy and art history. At about the same time, he began to write the text of a cantata, Das klagende Lied (the song of lament), his earliest surviving large-scale composition, which he composed during the following months and completed on November 1, 1880. Mahler’s main source of support had been his earnings from teaching piano, an occupation that he had begun nearly ten years earlier, but in the summer of 1880 he gained summer employment as a conductor at a resort. In the following year, he obtained a longer-term appointment as conductor at Laibach (now Ljubljana), and in January, 1883, a position at Olomouc, which he held for only a few months. In the middle of his modest but rising conducting career, Mahler continued to compose. In 1881, Mahler had unsuccessfully placed Das klagende Lied in competition for the Beethoven Prize, offered by a Vienna musical group. He later reflected that had he won the prize, he would not have had to remain in the world of the stage as an opera director, but much evidence points to the immense creative advantages that Mahler derived from his experiences as a conductor. In any event, his career continued to advance. In August of 1883, he started work as assistant at the Court Theatre of Kassel, Germany, and in August of the following year he moved to the German Theatre in Prague, the leading city of his native Bohemia, where he was successful as an interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

While still at Kassel, Gustav fell in love with a singer, Johanna Richter. When their relationship ended with Richter leaving Mahler for another man, Gustav composed a memorial to the affair, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1884; Songs of a Wayfarer). This cycle of four songs for soprano and orchestra, widely regarded as the composer’s first masterpiece, reveals with great force the emotional world of the twenty-three-year-old Mahler. His love of nature and capacity for grief are communicated in a strikingly original musical language that weds elements of folk song to unorthodox harmony and highly colorful orchestration. Songs of a Wayfarer reflects Mahler’s devotion to a famous collection of traditional poems and songs known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn (youth’s magic horn), from which he was to draw much inspiration in composing both songs and symphonies.

Mahler’s first four symphonies, completed between 1887 and 1900, are appropriately referred to as the“Wunderhorn” symphonies, since they incorporate verses and melodies from the original Wunderhorn sources and Mahler’s adaptations of them. Mahler’s conception of the symphony that it “must be like the world” and embrace everything allowed him to expand its scope by including vocal elements and by greatly lengthening the works. In Mahler’s works, the traditional form of the symphony is superseded by the composer’s expressive ambitions. Mahler sought a mastery of symphonic form but defined it more flexibly; unity was a matter not only of rational musical architecture but also of mood and philosophical intention.

In August, 1886, Mahler took up an appointment as second conductor at Leipzig, Germany, where he remained until May of 1888. His departure from Leipzig because of a conflict with the director sounds a characteristic note in Mahler’s subsequent conducting career; his standards were uncompromising and his methods were sometimes nearly tyrannical, and could not have been tolerated in any case had Mahler not been a musician of the highest caliber. His next position, begun on October 1, 1888, was as musical director at the Royal Budapest Opera; he remained there until March of 1891, immediately moving to Hamburg, Germany’s largest city, as chief opera conductor. During this period, the personal circumstances of Mahler’s life changed considerably; in 1889, his father, mother, and a married sister died within months of one another, and he had to assume responsibility for his brothers and sisters. Although he was well paid for his conducting, his finances were rarely in good order. Nevertheless he succeeded in completing many works, seeing to their performance as circumstances allowed. His success as a composer was not immediate. Only with the presentation in 1895 of his second symphony at his own expense and under his direction did Mahler achieve unquestioned recognition as a composer.

As Mahler’s fame as a conductor grew, he began to hope that he might be appointed to direct the Vienna Court Opera, which was the leading opera institution of its day. Although in his composing Mahler was a visionary, he approached his conducting career with a mastery of musical politics. One necessary step on the way to becoming director in Vienna was his conversion to Roman Catholicism; it might be doubted if a Protestant, let alone a Jew, could then have served in that capacity. Much has been said about Mahler’s conversion, but there is a consensus that it was practical rather than cynical and accorded with an important element in Mahler’s personality his receptivity to many varieties of spiritual experience.

On October 8, 1897, Mahler was named director of the Vienna Court Opera, a post that he held with distinction for most of ten years. It was a powerful but troublesome position, and Mahler was incapable of much compromise on artistic matters. Nevertheless, he succeeded in revitalizing the institution and was once congratulated by Emperor Francis Joseph I for “having made himself master of the situation” at the opera, where egos daily clashed in the pursuit of the often contradictory goals of personal fame and artistic integrity. Mahler became known as an advocate of clarity and the realization of the composer’s intentions, which sometimes led him to alter the musical scores of famous and popular works a practice that caused much criticism. He was for a time the elected leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, where he conducted memorable performances of symphonic works, including his own symphonies. Mahler’s great specialty, however, was the work of Richard Wagner, whose operas were the foundation of the operatic repertoire throughout Europe.

Unfortunately for subsequent generations, Mahler’s career antedates the era of widespread sound recording, but a fair notion of his conducting style can be gained from written accounts, which are almost unanimous in their praise. Many photographs, drawings, and caricatures of Mahler have been preserved, as well as a famous bust of the composer by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Mahler was a slightly built but athletic man; pictures of him show an almost gravely intelligent face with a high forehead and somewhat unruly hair. In conversation with friends and on the conductor’s podium, he seemed charismatic, but when he walked on the boulevards of Vienna people noticed a peculiar gait, which is now thought to have been a habit involuntarily recalling his mother’s lameness.

The last decade of Mahler’s life was a mixture of triumph and despair, but never of defeat. In 1901, he met Alma Schindler, at twenty-two perhaps the most beautiful woman in Vienna, and within a few months they were married. Late in 1902 their first daughter, Maria Anna, was born, followed in 1904 by another daughter, Anna Justine. Mahler’s yearly cycle of work consisted of conducting in Vienna and elsewhere through the winter, followed by composing in the summer in a modest cabin near the family’s lakeside summer home at Maiernigg in the Tyrol Mountains. Mahler’s circle of friends, which included many of the most talented and interesting people in Austria, extended to Paris and other major European centers. He was financially secure enough to sacrifice a substantial part of the royalties from the publication of his work to assist his publisher in printing Anton Bruckner’s symphonies. Yet having gained hard-won worldly success, he continued to pursue creative projects that can only be called gargantuan, especially in view of the limited time he could allot to them. More ominously, his inner creative life began to exact a toll both on his health and on his family life. Alma, at first a lively and adoring wife, began to believe that she was married to an abstraction; a musician herself, she had made a personal sacrifice when she married Mahler. In the summer of 1907, Mahler’s world came close to total collapse. His elder daughter, Maria, died of diphtheria, precipitating Alma’s breakdown from exhaustion. Then, on being examined by the doctor summoned to help Alma, Mahler was diagnosed as having a serious heart problem, which required a drastic curtailment of his activities.

Mahler’s personal suffering had been prefigured in much of his work of the preceding six years. In 1901 he had begun his Kindertotenlieder (songs on the death of children), published in 1905 as five songs to verses by the poet Friedrich Rückert; it is easy to believe Alma when she states that she reproached her husband for thus tempting fate. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, completed in 1904, is an explicitly tragic musical essay in which the “hammer-blows of fate” fall on the creator-protagonist as cruelly as they were soon to do in real life.

Mahler’s fortunes at the Vienna Court Opera were in decline when, in mid-1907, his resignation was announced. Although his departure was brought about in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by court officials, Mahler had been convinced for some time that his withdrawal would be to his own advantage, and he had been reviewing offers from New York for some time. Beginning on January 1, 1908, Mahler directed the Metropolitan Opera, leaving there to accept a three-year contract with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Both ventures were ill-advised on the grounds of his health and artistic prospects, and neither turned out particularly well, but as Mahler’s conducting career was coming to a conclusion he was at work on some of his finest compositions. His last major work to be performed in his lifetime, the Eighth Symphony, was first heard in Munich, Germany, in early September of 1910. This massive work, which requires for its performance hundreds of instrumentalists and several choirs, was enthusiastically acclaimed at its premiere in a manner reserved for a very few works of art. By this time Mahler had already completed Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), a song-cycle in essentially symphonic form, and his ninth symphony (1909). The Tenth Symphony, which was to remain incomplete, was begun in the summer of 1910.

More personal difficulties awaited Mahler as he prepared for the premiere of the Eighth Symphony and worked on the composition of the Tenth Symphony at Toblach. In June, Alma had gone, on her physician’s advice, to a spa near Tobelbad, Austria; in addition to rest, the doctor had prescribed dancing. There Alma met the young architect Walter Gropius and had an affair with him, which came to Mahler’s attention when Gropius accidentally, as he later claimed, addressed to “Director Mahler” a letter intended for Alma. In August, Mahler sought out Sigmund Freud, and in a few brief hours, according to Freud, was able to comprehend the harm that his obsession with music had done to his marriage. A break with Alma was averted, though a true reconciliation seems to have been impossible.

Mahler was perceptibly weakening, but he went on with a rigorous conducting schedule. In New York on February 21, 1911, critically ill with a streptococcal infection, he conducted his last concert. On returning to Europe, he sought treatment first in Paris and then in Vienna, but his heart was irreparably damaged. He died on May 18 in the Loew Sanatorium, at the age of fifty.

Significance

The dominant quality of Gustav Mahler’s music is its intensity of expression, through which the composer hoped to address the highest philosophical concerns. This ambitious program, which unfolds relentlessly in Mahler’s symphonies, remains a controversial one because of widely diverging concepts of the nature and limits of art. Mahler was the heir of Romanticism, which often valued the artist’s subjectivity above the conventions of art, and consequently his music has had limited appeal to those listeners who view art as ideally an expression of the intellect.

From his earliest works, Mahler’s music is full of extremes of emotion ranging from unbearable loneliness to religious transcendence. In achieving this richness of expression, Mahler drew on a vast store of musical experience in which the most influential voices were those of Ludwig van Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, and Wagner. From Beethoven and Bruckner he drew a sense of the possibilities of symphonic form and content, and from Schubert the lyric capacity of song. Wagner’s influence on Mahler and his generation was so profound that of all of Wagner’s contributions to late Romanticism, his extension of the limits of harmony is the only one that can be placed well above the rest. All of this and more Mahler grasped and transformed into a new musical language that is instantly recognizable. The clarity and inventiveness of his counterpoint and instrumentation are acknowledged even by those who do not especially care for his work as a whole: The Song of the Earth, in particular, shows Mahler’s genius for sparseness of orchestration and delicacy of instrumental color, and in a technical sense, at minimum, the work belongs to the small group of compositions that define the transition from Romanticism to modern music.

In the view of the American composer Aaron Copland, Mahler was the “focal point” of an age; he amplified the psychological tensions of nineteenth century European culture and helped to forge the “violent patterns” of modern music. Mahler’s influence on twentieth century music has been profound, diverting too much attention, in the view of Deryck Cooke, from the composer’s own creative achievement. Mahler was a generous mentor to Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, each of whom drew in some way on the master’s example. After Mahler’s death, there was a period of decades during which his works were seldom performed, but beginning with the 1960’s his popularity increased immensely, doubtless aided by the availability of his music on long-playing recordings. Composers as diverse as Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Karlheinz Stockhausen acknowledge debts to him, and the controversy surrounding his works has diminished. Mahler’s music seems likely to endure many cycles of fashion, and, at a distance of many decades, for some listeners it has taken on an almost archetypal status.

Further Reading

Barham, Jeremy, ed. Perspectives on Gustav Mahler. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. Essays analyzing some of Mahler’s compositions, their reception, his ideas about nature and aesthetics, and other topics.

Blaukopf, Kurt. Gustav Mahler. Translated by Inge Goodwin. London: Allen Lane, 1973. This book provides a well-integrated account of Mahler’s dual career and gives a sense of his music without recourse to a single musical quotation.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Mahler: A Documentary Study. Compiled and edited by Kurt Blaukopf. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Much of the material presented here will come alive only to those who already know the outlines of Mahler’s life, but this is a well-produced study with substantial content and not merely a coffee-table book.

Cooke, Deryck. Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. This book consists of a chronological presentation of the composer’s major works, framed by an introductory essay, “Mahler as Man and Artist,” and a postscript, “Mahler’s Report on Experience.” Most of the texts that Mahler employed are printed in German and English. Cooke’s opinions display his deep personal as well as scholarly commitment to Mahler’s music.

Feder, Stuart. Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Pres, 2004. Examines the crises in Mahler’s life and their impact on his music.

Gartenberg, Egon. Mahler: The Man and His Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1978. With the division of this book into two main sections, the author seems to acknowledge that his account of Mahler is overextended; his embellishment of the social and historical background of the composer’s time is interesting but often distracting.

Lebrecht, Norman. Mahler Remembered. London: Faber & Faber, 1987. This collection of accounts of Mahler by his friends, associates, enemies, and survivors is indispensable for understanding his role and status in European culture around the turn of the century.

Mitchell, Donald. Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. This is the third volume of Mitchell’s series of studies of Mahler’s music and, like its predecessors, it is aimed at the patient specialist rather than the general reader. Within the labyrinthine text, however, are found some of the keenest and most detailed insights into Mahler’s art.

Painter, Karen, ed. Mahler and His World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Collection of essays by musicologists and historians discussing the political, social, and literary changes reflected in Mahler’s music.

Werfel, Alma Schindler Mahler. Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters. Edited and with an introduction by Donald Mitchell. Translated by Basil Creighton. Rev. ed. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Mahler’s widow has been judged a frequently unreliable source of information and opinions, but her book makes fascinating reading.